De Facto State of Emergency in Southeastern Village
Residents in the village of Ovaköy in the southeastern province of Şırnak have been unable to leave their homes without permission from the military for the past 15 days. While officials are yet to offer an explanation, locals fear their livelihood is at risk, as they cannot venture outside to feed their animals or tend to their animals.
The villagers have not encountered such measures since 2004, said Raşit Uçar, a resident of Ovaköy in Şırnak's Silopi district, adding they were almost imprisoned inside their own homes.
Uçar told bianet that he had to go through a military checkpoint after he returned back from the district of Cizre where he had gone shopping for the Ramadan holiday.
"We go through half an hour of military checks each time we enter or exit the village. Vehicles are also forbidden inside the village; we had to walk for 800 meters back home to carry the goods we bought for the holiday," Uçar said.
"They are playing with our livelihood"
The village of Ovaköy consists of ten households, but the majority of locals left during the 1990s, leaving behind only 25 people living in three houses in the village.
"We are afraid. We cannot venture outside home in the evenings. Troops keep patrolling in the village," Uçar said.
Uçar explained that he had found a job to work as a guard for 750 Turkish Liras a month at a nearby cotton field.
"They did not allow me to go there because our last names did not match with the owner of the field; so I could not go to work. They do not let us go to our own fields [we had] sown or graze our sheep in the uplands. [Our] animals are going to starve to death. They are playing with our livelihood," he said.
They had not encountered such measures since the government ended the state of emergency (OHAL) in 2002, Uçar added.
"We were quite comfortable for the past four to five years. We were grazing our sheep and plowing our fields. When we ask the troops why they are behaving as such, they merely tell us they were ordered to do so. They never showed any official documents to us nor offered any explanation," he said.
There are no armed clashes near Ovaköy, and such measures do not exist in other villages in close vicinity, he said, adding they would have no other option left but to take refuge in the autonomous Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq since they have no other place to go if authorities issue a decision to expropriate the village.
"We are not even allowed to visit the creek before the house. We used to swim and fish there in the summer," Uçar said.
The governor's office in the southeastern province of Hakkari had named seven regions prohibited to entry in wake of the intense fighting that took place in the district of Şemdinli over the past month, but Ovaköy is not among them.
The Hakkari Governor's Office had listed the regions forbidden to entry until Oct. 6 as follows:
"The İkiyaka region, the east of Beytüşşebap in Şırnak and Altındağlar in central Hakkari, the Buzul Dağı region, the Alandüz region, the Mt. Balkaya region, the Gediktepe and Karadağ regions and the Çağlayan and Pirinçeken regions." (AS)